The Statute Staple and Trade Finance in Later Medieval England

Credit was ubiquitous in later medieval society. All medieval trade depended upon credit—the deferred part-payment for goods sold or advances for future delivery of goods. John Gower, the late fourteenth-century poet and moralist, certainly recognises in the above quote that merchants depended upon debt and perceptively identified the fragility of a commercial system that hinged upon credit. Chaucer, in a rather more positive tone, likewise clearly identifies the inseparability of merchants, buying and selling, and credit. The use of credit to purchase goods permeated all levels of later medieval society from the greatest magnates, like the Earl of Shrewsbury—buying goods on credit from a London mercer—and the Earl of Atholl in Scotland—purchasing merchandise from the owner of a tavern in Cock Row (Cokrowe), Norwich—to peasants, such as the shepherd John Rede of Soham (Cambridgeshire), who, at his death, was still owed 31s 11d in unpaid debts—and the husbandman, John Bygge of Stortford (Hertfordshire), who had purchased £6-worth of goods on credit from a haberdasher and a fishmonger in London. Credit was a pivotal component of English domestic trade. Wool merchants like John Heritage used credit to fund the various stages of their wool businesses. Many credit agreements were informal or oral, but by the fourteenth century, high-value debts were often documented and enrolled in special debt courts known as Staple courts. In 1423, Robert Belle, a merchant of Newcastle upon Tyne, travelled nearly 500 km to London and borrowed £40—deferred payment for goods he had bought—from William Stockdale, a draper of London. The amount was to be repaid eight months later, giving Belle time to sell the goods back in Newcastle and still have time to return to London and repay the money he owed. The agreement was enrolled at the Staple court in Westminster. This work examines the role of credit and debt agreements like this one in English trade between 1353 and 1532. This was a period of transformation, not least for the English economy, associated with climatic change, high mortality, endemic warfare, economic recession and bullion famines, all of which impacted upon trade and the merchants, like those described by Gower and Chaucer, men like Belle and Stockdale, who undertook it. The principal form of evidence used is the records of the Statute Staple, a royally sanctioned debt registration system which provided for the efficient recovery defaulted debts.